You are warmly invited to the following panel jointly convened by the Institute for the Study of the Americas and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies on Wednesday 16th March:
THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION & THE WORLD: RESPONSES TO INDEPENDENCE
Speakers:
Julia Gaffield, Duke University, ¡°The good understanding which ought always to subsist
between the two islands¡±: Haiti and Jamaica in the Atlantic World, 1803©\1804
Carrie Gibson, Cambridge University, ¡®Sim¨®n Bol¨ªvar, the United States, and the rejection of Haiti at the 1826
Congress of Panama¡¯
ABSTRACTS AND BIOS BELOW
Time: 5pm
Date: 16th March
Venue: The Senate Room, 1st floor, Senate House, London WC1E 7HU
Julia Gaffield, Duke University, ¡°The good understanding which ought always to subsist
between the two islands¡±: Haiti and Jamaica in the Atlantic World, 1803©\1804
Abstract: This paper studies the negotiations between the first leader of independent Haiti,
Jean©\Jacques Dessalines, and the Lieutenant©\Governor of Jamaica, George Nugent, during
the months surrounding Haiti's official Declaration of Independence. The conversations
between the two challenge descriptions of Haiti's experience as an independent country as
one of isolation. Indeed, the period immediately after independence represents a moment
of opening where the Haitian state might have formed a friendly alliance with the British in
Jamaica. However, this friendship would have constrained the sovereignty of the new state
and so no treaty was signed. This story highlights the importance of military strategy and
the diversity of ways that slave©\holding nations tried to contain the Haitian Revolution. It
also suggests that Haitian leaders did not feel desperate and were not willing to
compromise their autonomy for trade treaties.
Carrie Gibson, ¡®Sim¨®n Bol¨ªvar, the United States, and the rejection of Haiti at the 1826
Congress of Panama¡¯
Abstract: This paper looks at the complicated relationship between the Venezuelan general
and ¡®liberator¡¯ Sim¨®n Bol¨ªvar and the republic of Haiti. In 1815, Bol¨ªvar had welcomed the
offer from Alexandre P¨¦tion, then president of the southern half of the island, of refuge,
arms and aid, in exchange for a concession: that Bol¨ªvar was to abolish slavery in the new
Republic of Colombia. It was a promise he did not fully deliver. A decade later, when most
of Spanish America had been recognised as independent by Spain, Bol¨ªvar organised a
congress to take place in Panama. His aim was hemispheric in scope and the United States
was invited. The idea that the US would take part in such an event, compounded by the
possibility that Haiti could show up too, sent the US Senate into a frenzy, though it finally
agreed that delegates should attend. Haiti, however, was not to be invited because the US
was unwilling to recognise it as a republic, and so it did not qualify for an invitation. Bol¨ªvar
complied with this. Haiti, despite lingering in poverty since its independence in 1804, had
managed to take control of Spanish Santo Domingo in 1822, and its neighbours ¨C not least
the slave©\holding southern US states ¨C were nervous. The Congress of Panama was a
moment of tangible anxiety. This was not just about the Latin American republics¡¯
relationship with the US ¨C it also concerned what Haiti now represented to its northern and
southern neighbours: abolition, occupation and race warfare, pushing aside for at least a
century any notion of a shared history of struggle.
Bios: Julia Gaffield is a PhD Candidate at Duke University in the United States. She
completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and did a Master's at
York University, both in Canada. Her disseration studies the international relationships that
the Haitian state formed after independence and considers the differing ways that countries
and colonies arround the Atlantic reacted to news of Haiti's Declaration of Independence.
She is currently undertaking research in London as part of this project and will also travel to
Copenhagen and Paris in a couple of weeks. Carrie Gibson recently completed her doctorate
at the University of Cambridge on the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the Spanish
Caribbean.
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